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The Australian Small Business Blog

Wednesday, October 04, 2017

Getting Started in Business

It’s always daunting for anyone starting their first business. Making the transition from working for someone else, where things just seem to happen. The customers appear, and you serve them. Surely it can’t be that difficult. However, within a few days on your own in the big wide world, it doesn’t appear at all easy, and hardest of all is knowing where to start.

As I result, I would like to commend St George Bank and the Bank of Melbourne's new initiative that provides small business resources for the confused just starting out, and best of all, many of these resources are free.

What most impressed me was their hold-your-hand approach for business planning. It begins with you selecting the type of business you want to start (eg B2B, B2C, products or services) and then takes you step-by-step through each part of the plan, with lots of examples to help make sure that all key parts of your new business are considered. It’s all too easy to miss something when you start your first business.

Also provided is a checklist of other steps you need to take, for example registering a business name, creating a credit policy, and getting an ABN. However it’s much more than just a checklist, actually showing you how, for example, to register for GST, and the basics of pricing.

All the above are free, but there are additional resources such as bookkeeping packages, document storage, legal document templates, Customer Relationship Management software to help you manage your marketing and sales and templates you can use to build your own website with no previous webdesign experience. The banks have negotiated discounted rates for these packages which cover essential areas of any business: Finances, Protection and Marketing.

When starting your business, you may have a very small budget, but with these resources, that’s all you need!